We can't talk about Wing Energy (also known as Eolic Energy) nowadays without talking about T. Boone Pickens and his plan.
The Pickens Plan (http://www.pickensplan.com/ - watch the video presentation) is an energy policy proposal announced July 8, 2008. Pickens' intention is to reduce American dependency on foreign oil imports by investing approximately US$1 trillion to build vast wind turbine farms for power generation, and then shifting the natural gas used for power generation to fuel automobiles.
This is a great move by Pickens, but it has some potential (and very critical) problems, which follow:
1- Problems with the grid (for more on this see the NY Times article). It turns out that all this electricity generated by wind turbines needs power lines to get distributed to the places that need it. The power lines (or power grid) in the US are getting old and have not had an overhaul in quite a while, and like any other equipment that is old and has not been renovated is facing serious breakdowns.
2- Mr. Pickens plan to substitute natural gas for vehicle imported fuel has some downfalls too. Natural gas is better used to provide backup to wind power, not to power cars. Natural gas is burned far more efficiently in power plants than in internal combustion engines. It would be more efficient to generate electricity from natural gas and then power electric cars. Also keep in mind that Natural Gas in non-renewable and is not 100% clean.
3- The plan also has possible ethics dilemma. According to an article in Popular Mechanics, if the plan is accepted, Pickens stands to reap a significant profit by building pipelines to pump billions of gallons of water from an aquifer under the Texas Panhandle, which he has bought the water rights to. The pipeline would follow the same 250-mile corridor that the wind farm would be on, which would be seized from private owners through eminent domain and granted to him. Pickens owns more water than anyone else in the U.S. However, according to Pickens, "I'm 80 years old and have $4 billion. I don't need any more money."
4- Subsidies, government funds… same old. Is there ever a true business model (without having to involve government money)? The CATO Institute (an organization co-founded by Charles Koch, a co-owner of Koch Industries which is the largest privately held oil company in the U.S, and funded by companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, Tenneco Gas and Amoco) claims that instead of allowing the market to work, Pickens wants government to limit imports of foreign oil along with installing the wind plants so that he can become richer at the expense of consumers. He also says that if wind power were a sensible economic investment, then it would not require the "lavish federal and state subsidies already in place or the additional largesse sought after by Mr. Pickens."
On the other hand…maybe these are Lobbyist acting on behalf of Big Oil, to protect their turf!
ASSUMING ALL OF THE ABOVE IS DISMISSED OR RESOLVED
There are some serious technical challenges for today's wind turbines.
Even though wind turbines (or wind generators) are widely used around the globe (more so in Europe than in America). The existing turbines are far from efficient and some wind farm profitability models are based on government funds. The promise for a next generation of turbines is the solution to increased profitability and lower barrier to entry into the Wind farm market.
How efficient are Wind Turbines?
There are several ways in which a turbine loses its efficiency.
1- There is a fundamental law of physics (Betz Law) which states that the best that could be achieved by a wind turbine is around 59% efficiency. This is due to the fact that if you take ALL the energy from the wind coming into the turbine you should have zero wind speed exiting from the turbine, which is an impossibility (there has to be a FLOW of wind to keep the propellers rotating)
2- Wind Speed: Wind Turbines are designed to be most efficient at certain wind speeds. As we all know (especially here in Florida) wind is very unpredictable. Therefore, today’s turbines lose efficiency because of changes in wind speed.
3- To generate power that can be used by today’s appliances or injected into the electric grid, the turbine has to generate electricity at a constant frequency (60 hertz in the US – 50Hz in Europe) and certain voltage (120 Volts in US – 230V in Europe). In order to achieve this rotor speed has to be “converted” to a constant speed (1500 rpm) and maintained this way throughout the operation of the turbine. This causes loss of efficiency in the speed conversion process as well as in the “monitoring” process (to ensure constant speed).
When all these losses are figured in, you might, if you are lucky, be getting 35% or so of the wind's energy actually delivered as useful electrical energy to the end user in the very best conditions. The average might only be in the twenties.
In the future we will talk about the different types of wind turbines and how each one takes a step closer to maximize efficiency. Until then, SHALOM!
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4 comments:
This is a very good piece of information. Most of us think of wind power as a utopic solution to energy issues, but I guess that new technologies have to climb mountains steeper and higher than we expect. Let's be positive and say that, the higher the mountain, the more opportunities there are in greentech.
Problems with wind (or solar for that matter) are being overstated. Electricity from wind today costs about 8-9 cents per kWh. That is competitive with NG and guaranteed not to increase and pollution free. When you take into account that what you are comparing to, NG, will continue to increase in cost you then see that wind is already cheaper than generating electricity from NG. NG is a great fuel for peaker plants that fill in the gaps but not necessarily the best choice for base load generation.
It is true that transmission lines need to be built to connect wind and solar rich areas with demand. Why shouldn’t government invest in such infrastructure? Governments built the roads that made the widespread use of automobiles possible? How many of today's technologies were enabled by military or government projects that paid for research and early demand? Radar, wireless communication, computers… This is nothing new. Technologies that have societal benefits will very often get funded initially from pooled or government funds.
I am glad to see jhdesoto's comment as well as Sami’s comment (not me, but the other Sami) I believe I addressed these issues in my last post “The Gold at the End of the Rainbow”. Perhaps I was not eloquent enough, but the idea was to illustrate that the solutions are within reach (as jhdesoto states in his comment) and that THE FACT THAT WE ARE NOT THERE YET is what creates the BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY (as Sami states in his comment).
Either way there is still a lot of discussion regarding the cost of generating electricity with alternative methods. From what I have learned the goal is to reach 1 to 2 cents per kWh (which is supposedly what coal costs nowadays) and I believe wind is at 4 to 6 cents per kWh as of 2007 installations (source Berkley Lab Database)
Today's cost are a lot higher than that. Here in Florida wholesale cost of a kWh is 7 cents. We pay about 12 cents (+5 cents for distribution). In Boston, wholesale cost is 12 cents and distribution is 7 cents (19¢/kWh!). These costs are increasing in general and vary from month to month, year to year. Renewable resources like wind or solar are relatively fixed because they have no variable input. Weather can have an impact but it is more of a random component and not a trend.
So using fuel based sources is like getting a variable rate mortgage while using solar or wind is more like a fixed rate mortgage. Prices don't need to be exactly the same for the fixed to be a better choice.
BTW I did my thesis at MIT on pricing renewable energy assets and forecasting future energy costs and sources. One of these days I can do a presentation if people are interested in this.
Joaquin
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